This article is part of a series of stories and op-eds launched by IPS on the occasion of the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought on June 17.

DAKAR, Senegal, Jun 11 2018 (IPS) - Hope, smiles and new vitality seem to be returning slowly but surely in various parts of the Sahel region, where the mighty Sahara Desert has all but ‘eaten’ and degraded huge parts of landscapes, destroying livelihoods and subjecting many communities to extreme poverty.

GENEVA, Jan 19 2018 (IOM) - IOM, the UN Migration Agency, is appealing for nearly USD 1.4 billion to address the needs of over 80 million people in 50 countries in 2018. These vital funds will support people displaced within the borders of their own countries, migrants, refugees and the communities that host them, people returning to their areas of origin and people experiencing or recovering from conflict and natural disasters.

NAIROBI, Oct 12 2017 (IPS) - A growing number of African countries are increasingly becoming food insecure as delayed and insufficient rainfall, as well as crop damaging pests such as the ongoing outbreak of the fall armyworm, cause the most severe maize crisis in the last decade.

Experts have warned that as weather patterns become even more erratic and important crops such as maize are unable to resist the fall armyworm infestation, there will not be enough food on the table.

ROME, Sep 23 2016 (IPS) - Rome ….. Termini station, 2:00 pm on a Tuesday afternoon. Five young boys are standing next to the escalators, constantly shifting, dispersing, meeting up again. They are laughing, typing on their phones, chatting, smoking. They seem like average teenagers with fancy hairstyles and smart clothes. But every once in a while, they nervously glance over to the security personnel circling Termini station. Or carefully examine older men walking by.

KUWAIT CITY, Apr 2 2015 (IPS) - As the world’s spreading humanitarian crisis threatens to spill beyond the borders of Syria and Iraq into Libya and Yemen, the United Nations is already setting its sights on the first World Humanitarian Summit scheduled to take place in Istanbul next year.

“Let us make the response to the Syria crisis a launching pad for a new, truly global partnership for humanitarian response,” says Antonio Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees.

BAHARIYA OASIS, Egypt, Jul 12 2014 (IPS) - Using a hoe, farmer Atef Sayyid removes an earthen plug in an irrigation stream, allowing water to spill onto the parcel of land where he grows dates, olives and almonds.

Until recently, a natural spring exploited since Roman times supplied the iron-rich water that he uses for irrigation. But when the spring began to dry up in the 1990s, the government built a deep well to supplement its waning flow.

WASHINGTON, May 20 2014 (IPS) - The Middle East’s seemingly endless conflicts are diverting attention and resources from a graver long-term threat that looms over the whole region: the growing scarcity of water. And the situation will get worse before it gets better — if it ever does get better.

CAIRO, Apr 27 2014 (IPS) - Saber Abd El-Mawgoud began his career with castrating sheep and goats before moving on to humans. His first human experiment was a young boy he attempted to circumcise back in 1999 on the insistence of the boy’s father.

The boy died a few days later of infection from the operation, Mawgoud, 67, from the Al-Monofiya governorate 60 km north of Cairo tells IPS.

Mawgoud says he continued to practise with a nurse as assistant for some years, before starting out on his own again.

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 16 2013 (IPS) - Despite the United Nations’ “zero tolerance” policy against sexual violence, there has been a rash of gender-based crimes in several of the world’s conflict zones, including South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Northern Uganda, Somalia, the Central African Republic – and, more recently, in politically-troubled Egypt and Syria.

CAIRO, May 10 2013 (IPS) - Regardless of who is responsible for Egypt’s current political impasse – be it the administration of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi or an aggressive secular opposition – local experts are certain of at least one fact: Egypt’s dire economic circumstances will not improve without political stability.

The emergency room of Mansoura International Hospital is closed, a lock and chain securing its entrance. Ambulances carrying stroke and burn victims are ordered to go elsewhere.

Just hours earlier, dozens of people stormed this mid-sized hospital in northern Egypt, carrying a relative injured in a car accident. The group overpowered the military officers guarding the front door, fired shots in the air, and threatened to kill doctors and nurses unless they operated immediately on their relative.

TRIPOLI, Sep 2 2012 (IPS) - In the aftermath of Libya’s revolution, Libyan fighters and weapons are flooding areas of conflict in neighbouring countries, according to local fighters and officials in several countries.

Libya’s still heavily armed militias continue to sell their weapons on the black market directly to foreign militias from war-ridden countries, or to arms-dealers from third countries who then sell them on to warring factions, they say.

Aug 21 2012 (IPS) - With more restrictions placed on the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, and access to the Palestinian territory’s smuggling tunnels increasingly blocked, human rights groups say Gaza’s 1.6 million residents are unfairly being punished for the attack on an Egyptian military base in Sinai.

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jun 25 2012 (IPS) - It’s the type of honour roll that journalists would prefer not to be on.

But as an emotional Allison Bethel-McKenzie read out the names of the 72 journalists who have made that grim list so far this year, even Trinidad and Tobago’s president, George Maxwell Richards, was moved to plead for “some form of internationally recognised immunity” to lessen the risks to journalists while doing their jobs.